Airbnb permanently bans parties and events around the world | Hacker News Reader

Airbnb permanently bans parties and events around the world

bbc.com

33 pointsthesecretceo33 comments

I suspect anyone who is inclined to rent an AirBnb and then throw a party at it is not going to be overly concerned with whether AirBnb policy allows for parties or not.

They can now be banned for non-destructive parties. The reduction in party complaints has been about 40% during the temporary measure.

what's the point in banning people for non destructive parties?

Non-destructive parties can still be loud and annoying to the residents that actually live in the area. And I'd bet that probably leads to negative feelings toward AirBNB from those folks and increased chance of banning it outright.

At some point, AirBnB will let hosts assign cleanup fees that are specified upfront and these will end up being deterrents. Most hotels seem to ask for a $150-300 cleaning fee for smoking in the room and I'm guessing they're able to make it stick because I just don't smell tobacco smoke anymore.

Fewer people smoke, and fewer people have a problem with stepping outside to smoke nowadays.

Payment card networks specifically forbid merchants from taking payment for damages that the customer has not specifically agreed to pay (via chip or tap to pay), so any chargeback is easily lost by the hotel. Technically, the smoking fee can be pursued in court, but no hotel is going through the effort of proving it, and even if they could, the legal fees would be huge.

Smoking fees are mostly just a deterrent, and the real consequence is you get put on a “do not rent” list at the hotel.

I am waiting for Hilton/Hyatt/Marriott/IHG/choice/Wyndham to roll out company wide do not rent lists. They might not have much motivation, however, since they just franchise hotel brands and the hotel owners are the ones that pay for all the damage.

Hotels get either a deposit or pre-auth on your credit card and have you sign an agreement that you're on the hook for damages. Yes, they are probably not going to pursue you in excess of the pre-auth, but they're largely covered in typical cases, and you won't win a chargeback if you damaged a room or even the linen.

Also, there are already shared DNR lists hotels use for egregious misbehavior. Within hotel chains, there are more extensive lists.

I know from personal experience the hotel will lose the chargeback. The message from the opposing bank will be something like “merchant agreements does not cover damages” or something. Basically, unless the customer agreed to pay a specific number, and you have proof of it, I would not expect to win the chargeback.

The security deposit pre auth at check serves more of a credit check purpose. Generally, if you are getting too many problem customers, you increase the security deposit because you are betting most problem causers will have fewer funds available at any given time. A couple hundred dollars is not going to cover any real damage costs.

The other problem is proving the damage was caused by the guest, as you are not typically going over all the existing damage in a room prior to giving the guest a key.

The way to get people to pay, however, was to threaten to go to small claims court, and most people will choose to avoid that hassle and simply pay.

I have never seen an official shared DNR list by any of the major hotel brands shared with individual hotel owners. If an owner/management company has multiple hotels, then I have seen shared lists.

Sorry, yes, you're right about the DNR.

The rest, I like your comment and don't doubt your personal experience, but we will have to disagree on the typical experience. Hotels do win chargebacks for damages and get most people to go along with them. Those contracts aren't toothless and you've probably noticed communication about responsibility for damages and required signatures has improved over the last couple decades. At the same time, they're of course good at waiving accidents, small expenses if requested, etc.

The room renter has always been responsible for damage. The room in most chains is checked between stays and, outside of unusual scenarios, it's customary for the guest to let the front desk know about existing problems as soon as possible to avoid assuming some responsibility.

The customer might be responsible, but their credit cards’ bank is going to tell the hotel to pound sand. They want clear proof of the customers’ willingness to engage in that specific transaction, including the amount, and an agreement stating customer is liable for unspecified damages is not sufficient.

Some hotel guests will not contest it, but I bet if they did, they would easily win the chargeback. How is the hotel even going to prove that smoking occurred in the room and by that guest?

Ability to collect payment is the problem, even if you have a binding contract with a customer.

> The room in most chains is checked between stays and, outside of unusual scenarios, it's customary for the guest to let the front desk know about existing problems as soon as possible to avoid assuming some responsibility.

Ideally, and it might work in small claims court to state the hotel guest is responsible because they did not report the existing damage at check in. But the customer’s credit card bank is not going to care, and their burden of proof is pretty high. And as I wrote earlier, they can always just say “our merchant agreement prohibits charges for damage and non sales related transactions”.

It goes back to the contract making the guest signing the paperwork, and handing over the credit card, responsible for damage, as well as managing evidence of details of the stay. The clear proof of that willingness is readily supplied by the hotel which has the paperwork. The verbal and visual presentation walkthrough of the paperwork creates expectations which reduce chargeback rates, but documentation those processes also accompany the chargeback documentation to build a case for the charge being previously agreed. Hotels don't have a "pound sound" relationship with banks, issuers and merchant accounts, but rather work together to come up with policies and paperwork that are more clear to customers so work better for everyone.

Again, I understand that you have personally been successful with some chargebacks.

No, I have been unsuccessful challenging chargebacks. I know many hotel owners, 50 to 200 key non resort type hotels), and do not know any hotel owner that has a relationship with any bank, issuer, or merchant processor.

You buy the franchise from Hilton/Hyatt/etc, and then they force you to pay for the computer systems and merchant processors they contract with, and you have no choice in the matter. The hotel owner is the smallest player in this chain, and has zero leverage. If I had the paperwork handy, I would link you to a screenshot of what the chargeback paperwork says, and it is very clear that the issuing bank such as Chase/Wells Fargo/etc will state the credit card is not to be used for purposes of collecting payment for damages.

Parties and events are a huge problem for hosts, but they are getting easier to detect and prevent with tools like exterior/doorbell cameras and decibel monitoring.

I suspect that a blanket ban on them is more likely aimed at changing the public narrative around airbnbs. It’s not that hard for a group of NIMBYist neighbors to cite parties and noise to justify a blanket ban on airbnbs in their community… at the very least this gives STR owners a simple soundbite on the topic of parties.

It’s not NIMBYism to expect the apartment upstairs to not become a cheap hotel, where tenants change everyday and there’s noise from throughout the day and the night.

Not referring to situations like that. I’m referring to situations where controlling neighbors use vague or hypothetical problems to exercise their will over what responsible property owners are doing with, you know, their private property. If you have noise issues, file a noise complaint.

It’s much quicker to ban activities that inevitably lead to undesirable behaviour (such as converting your flat into a cheap hostel and the entire building into a hotel lobby), rather than playing whack-a-mole with all sorts of antisocial behaviour one has to put up with if the apartment upstairs becomes a cheap hostel.

You could use that argument to restrict just about any type of activity you don’t like. Who is the decider?

> Who is the decider?

Anyone capable of enforcing a decision.

It is if you still use Airbnb yourself while traveling.

I don’t use AirBnB because their customer service is shit.

Said that, it’s not my responsibility to ensure the flat I’m renting is owned by a real business that follows all the rules and not by a rando whose cheap hostel is causing havoc in the neighbourhood. That should be Airbnb’s responsibility.

But it’s fine for your neighbors to make noise throughout the day and night and host (for free) lots of different guests in their spare bedroom?

Like these discussions seem so odd because while you could just ban the undesirable behavior there’s some recognition that it would never pass because it’s ridiculous and people move on to banning things associated with the undesirable behavior.

The undesirable behavior is banned (excessive noise), it is simply not expected to be able to be enforced, so proxy actions are banned that (one assumes) have a high likelihood of leading to that problem.

> But it’s fine for your neighbors to make noise throughout the day and night and host (for free) lots of different guests in their spare bedroom?

No, it’s not and that’s banned as well.

> Like these discussions seem so odd because while you could just ban the undesirable behavior there’s some recognition that it would never pass because it’s ridiculous and people move on to banning things associated with the undesirable behavior.

The undesirable behaviour includes the presence of strangers in my apartment block, who are given the key to the main door.

Seems bizarre to take such a uniform approach. Why not let hosts decide?

Perhaps is it a perceived liability issue

Because hosts often do not live in the houses they put on AirBnB or anywhere near them. The nuisances caused are an externality to them so why bother to care?

I find this funny. You have a ski chalet that sleeps 20. That’s gonna be rented out by four families with kids, or 20 adults. 20 adults in one building is almost always a party. It’s probably a minority of the time that it’s not either kid mayhem, or just straight up adults partying.

I think if you rent a ski chalet that sleeps 20 you should have a reasonable set of expectations around 20 guests and the impact they will have. It’s situations where 20 guests invite another 20 people over who were previously unaccounted for in the reservation, or those 20 guests produce an excessive amount of noise (beyond what you’d expect of 20 people) or cause an unreasonable amount of mess that this is trying to get at.

20 people can be just as destructive as 40. A bachelor party of 20 is a lot of testosterone…

OMG This needs to be the best headline ever.

It takes a charitable reading to make it even a decent headline. It's not ideal wording for what the ban covers. The wording (not the real ban) covers the "Belgian" Grand Prix in August, CITI Open aka Washington Open tennis tournament in late July, to name two "events".

This all just reads like typical AirBnB PR nonsense. From the company's press release:

>"In 2021, over 6,600 guests were suspended from Airbnb for attempting to violate our party ban."[1]

Just using the company's own 2021 statistics, they had 6 million properties[2][3] . So they "suspended" .1% of their properties for being bad neighbors. Is that an impressive figure? Further they suspended them for violating their policy nowhere does it what a suspension entails though. Was it a 24 hour suspension? A week?

Under the heading "How the codified policy will work"

>"The policy will continue to include serious consequences for guests who attempt to violate these rules, varying from account suspension to full removal from the platform."

If the policy has actually been "codified" then why not state to the public what that codified policy actually is? Is it 3 complaints in a month for a suspension? is it 5 per year? What's the threshold for platform removal? Where can neighbors look up the status? Lack of any meaningful details is the opposite of codified.

Further they state:

>"We believe there is a direct correlation between our implementation of the policy in August 2020 and a 44% year-over-year drop in the rate of party reports."

The summer of 2020 when they instituted this policy was the height of the pandemic and before there was a vaccine available. I think the majority of people beyond a certain young demographic were largely avoiding party style crowds during this period. To use this period as a measure for successful policy implementation seems disingenuous at best.

[1] https://news.airbnb.com/official-codification-of-party-ban/

[2] https://news.airbnb.com/about-us/

[3] https://news.airbnb.com/airbnb-hosts-share-more-than-six-mil...

> Just using the company's own 2021 statistics, they had 6 million properties[2][3] . So they "suspended" .1% of their properties for being bad neighbors. Is that an impressive figure? Further they suspended them for violating their policy nowhere does it what a suspension entails though. Was it a 24 hour suspension? A week?

It says guests not hosts so they banned people renting AirBnB not people renting out AirBnBs.

So 6600 out of hundreds of millions of bookings a year then?

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